


Be It Ever So Humble

by endgirl



Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:37:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endgirl/pseuds/endgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Several months after Tears, Cara and Kahlan find a new home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be It Ever So Humble

**Author's Note:**

> This was posted a while back on LJ, but I forgot to add it here.

The castle stood sturdy and resolute in the fading orange sunset. Kahlan stared up at its modest spires, at the three-windowed curtain wall above the main gate and the diminutive keep peeking out from behind the main bailey. This new home could have fit inside the Confessor’s Palace a hundred times over, and Kahlan gave a relieved little sigh that made the corners of Cara’s mouth quirk.

“I take it this meets your specifications, Mother Confessor,” Cara said, her voice clipped with the teasing formality Kahlan knew she used when she was nervous. It had been a long time since Cara had uttered her title with anything but devotion.

Kahlan squeezed her hand, her smile growing wide as she noticed in the sprigs of yellow summer flowers that had been placed in the narrow windows. Her breath caught in her throat. “It’s perfect.”

After she had learned she was with child, Kahlan had dreamed of leaving King’s Row for a cottage in the country, where she and Cara could sit by the hearth or lie beneath the trees in the orchard, and imagine a different world. A better one. A world where the Imperial Order was no more than a nightmarish villain in a tavern tale, and her greatest responsibility was to decide when to pick blackberries or how much wood to chop for an early evening fire.

Reality had made quick and brutal work of her fantasies. She was still the Mother Confessor, and her duties were to the people of the Midlands, not to her own heart. Her dreams of thatched roofs and fresh-picked flowers wilted in the face of council meetings and the petitions of kings. Even the birth of their child, still tiny and delicate beneath her flat belly, would be a service to the state. A promise that she would not be the last. That was, after all, why Cara bore scars of a quest that had taken her to the Old World, over the sea, and back again, all to ensure that Kahlan could give a daughter to her people without breaking either of their hearts.

She had told Cara of her dream-cottage only once, in a halting whisper half-muffled by a sheet, long after the candles in the Mother Confessor’s chambers had been extinguished. She knew it was silly. It would be impractical for them to stray far from the Confessor’s Palace, inconceivable for her to abandon her responsibilities in Aydindril. She rushed to speak these thoughts out loud -- to make rational words erase the fantasy, to convince them both how futile it was to hope.

Cara said nothing that night, but only pulled Kahlan closer under the blankets. Kahlan assumed her mate’s reticence was simply evidence of the impossibility of their situation, a silent submission to the fact that no, they would never have a normal life. But in the morning Cara was gone from their bed, and when she returned after dark her face was smudged with dirt and sunburn. _A cottage is too impractical to defend_ , she had said distractedly, picking at mysterious flecks of grey on her usually meticulous leathers as they sat down to supper. The words themselves were a denial, but Cara’s eyes flashed with a determined glint and the sparkle of a secret that made Kahlan’s chest clench with hope renewed.

And now here they were, three weeks later, standing in the twilight shadow of the home Cara had built with her own hands and a small army of masons. The valley was only a league from Aydindril, but it was far enough. The crisp air was tinged not with the crunch of wagon wheels or shouts from market stalls, but with the rustling of trees and the lazy quacks of ducks floating on the placid water beneath the bridge. Kahlan could smell the sweet tang of blackberries wafting in from the meadows. A castle was not quite a cottage, but the walls were as warm and beckoning as stone could be, and a laugh laced with joyful tears escaped Kahlan’s lips as she realized that each turret and spire had been topped with soft heaps of straw thatching.

Kahlan turned to Cara to speak her gratitude once more, but her words dissolved in the face of the intensity she found in the Mord-Sith’s eyes. Instead she tangled their fingers together and tugged Cara toward the gate. She knew that somewhere nearby, behind mossy walls, was a crackling fire. And before it, a hearth.  



End file.
